In the past two years, there has been a wave of price increases in the smartphone market. Samsung Apple has pulled the price of high-end handsets to thousands of dollars. Chinese companies such as Xiaomi and Huawei have also raised their average sales prices (China’s mobile phone market has dropped sharply, Price some relationship).

However, the price increase is not the only theme in the mobile phone market. According to the latest news from foreign media, several Chinese handset makers recently introduced an ultra-cheap mobile phone with a price of about 80 US dollars under the call of Google.

As we all know, Google developed Android is the world’s largest mobile operating system, occupy Jiucheng share. Last year, in order to promote the mobile phone market in Asia, Africa and Latin America, Google introduced a lightweight Android “Andrews GO”, this system significantly reduces the hardware requirements for smart phones, which means Android phones will further reduce the purchase cost .

According to the U.S. technology news website ZDNET, under the auspices of Google, at the World Mobile Communications Congress in Barcelona, ​​Spain, including ZTE, TCL and Nokia brands (Nokia brand operators are Foxconn Group and HMD with Chinese capital background, in fact Is a Chinese cell phone), have introduced ultra-cheap phones less than a hundred dollars.

Last week, Google said it would appear in Barcelona with an ultra-cheap handset for the Android 8-light version, with some products priced at about $ 50, or about $ 350.

TCL’s low-cost handsets are priced at about 100 euros, equivalent to 120 US dollars, will be on sale in April, the phone uses a MediaTek processor, the configuration of 1GB of memory, flash memory is 16GB, support for memory cards.

This product is equipped with a 5.3-inch screen with a resolution of only 480P.

ZTE cheap machines in the United States unlock the price of only 80 US dollars, using Qualcomm Snapdragon 210 processor, 1GB memory and 8GB flash memory configuration.

HMD and Foxconn introduced a low-cost mobile phone Nokia 1, priced at about 85 US dollars, using MediaTek processor, memory flash memory configuration similar to the ZTE products.

In 2017, the world’s smartphones experienced a year-on-year decline. China’s mobile phone market plunged more than 10%. In the face of mobile phone market saturation, almost all first-tier brands except Huawei and Xiaomi have shrunk. In addition, many of China’s second and third tier Mobile phone out of the market, or suffered a financial crisis, business executives were indicted, was frozen assets.

However, in some countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, there is still potential for growth in the handset market. For example, the statistics show that the Indian smartphone market grew by 14% last year and the number one growth in the world, while Chinese companies gained half of the market. In addition, many consumers in India still purchase ancient feature phones due to their weak spending power, which means that there will still be a vast market for smartphones in the future.

A few years ago, Google had introduced one of their own cheap mobile phone plans “Android One”, that Google subsidies, and multinational handset manufacturers to launch cheap phones at a price of 100 dollars, Google is responsible for all system and application software upgrades. However, the plan basically failed, mainly due to the low price of mobile phones launched by Google and partners, poor performance and difficult to compete with the Chinese company’s products.

After occupying half of India’s market, Chinese companies began to expand into Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and other markets to continue to expand sales, which means that Google’s own low-cost mobile phone living space is increasingly narrow.

After the launch of the lightweight version of Android, whether Google’s low-cost mobile phone strategy has changed, whether to completely stop selling this year, is still unknown.

In addition to the above vendors, the audio-video company in Shenzhen, China is a very low profile in the industry, but has become the leader in the smart phone market in Africa and monopolized the market with Samsung Electronics. The mobile phones of the company also use the Android operating system.